Feb 6, 2014: The Pontifical Council for Social Communications has released a communique
commenting on Pope Francis’s message for the upcoming World Youth Day (WYD) to be
celebrated on Palm Sunday, April 13th in each diocese around the world. The theme
chosen for this celebration is taken from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” In his message the Pope reflects on
the meaning of this theme and urges young people to use the revolutionary power of
the Beatitudes as a central point of reference in their lives.
This is the
first annual Message from Pope Francis to the youth of the world. It follows the tradition
begun by Blessed John Paul II and continued by Benedict XVI on the occasion of each
World Youth Day. Pope Francis is resuming the conversation he began with young people
at the very successful WYD that took place in Rio de Janeiro in July 2013. He presents
the themes for the next three WYDs in order to set in motion the three-year path of
spiritual preparation leading to the international celebration in Krakow in July 2016.
The
themes for the next three WYDs are taken from the Beatitudes. The Holy Father considers
this passage from Matthew’s Gospel to be a central point of reference in a Christian’s
life. It should be part of everyone’s life plan.
In this Message, the Holy
Father reminds young people that Jesus himself showed the way by embodying the Beatitudes
in his life. It is a real challenge for young people today to live according to the
Beatitudes by following Jesus. It means going against the tide and being witnesses
of revolutionary innovation. As you cannot be a real Christian and “think small” about
life, the Pope urges young people to resist “low cost” offers of happiness and to
have the courage to be truly happy, a gift that only God can give.
Pope Francis
explains to young people what it means to be “poor in spirit”, thus entering into
the heart of the theme for the next World Youth Day. Jesus himself chose the way of
dispossession and poverty. The Pope addressed a pressing invitation to young people
to imitate Jesus, and he pointed to the example of Saint Francis of Assisi. Young
Christians are therefore called to conversion, to embrace an evangelical lifestyle,
one of moderation in which we seek the essential and act in solidarity with the poor.
The Pope explains that the poor are both the “suffering flesh” of Christ that we are
all called to personally touch, and they are also true masters of life, often with
much to offer on the human and spiritual plane.
The Pope emphasises the close
connection between the theme for the Rio WYD – “Go and make disciples of all nations!”
(cf Mt 28:19) – and the Beatitude about the poor in spirit. Pope Francis explains,
“evangelical poverty is a basic condition for spreading the kingdom of God”. It is
often the most simple of hearts that express true joy, and evangelisation depends
on this joy. The Holy Father reminds young people that thirty years have passed
since the Cross of the Jubilee of the Redemption was entrusted to young people. The
anniversary is on 22 April. “That symbolic act by John Paul II was the beginning of
the great youth pilgrimage which has since crossed the five continents”. Pope Francis
tells young people that after John Paul II’s canonisation, “an event marked by immense
joy”, he will be “the great patron of the World Youth Days which he inaugurated and
always supported”.
Please find below a translation in English of Pope Francis’
message:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
(Mt 5:3)
Dear Young Friends,
How vividly I recall the remarkable meeting
we had in Rio de Janeiro for the Twenty-eighth World Youth Day. It was a great celebration
of faith and fellowship! The wonderful people of Brazil welcomed us with open arms,
like the statue of Christ the Redeemer which looks down from the hill of Corcovado
over the magnificent expanse of Copacabana beach. There, on the seashore, Jesus renewed
his call to each one of us to become his missionary disciples. May we perceive this
call as the most important thing in our lives and share this gift with others, those
near and far, even to the distant geographical and existential peripheries of our
world.
The next stop on our intercontinental youth pilgrimage will be in Krakow
in 2016. As a way of accompanying our journey together, for the next three years I
would like to reflect with you on the Beatitudes found in the Gospel of Saint Matthew
(5:1-12). This year we will begin by reflecting on the first Beatitude: “Blessed are
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3). For 2015 I suggest:
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). Then, in 2016, our
theme will be: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Mt 5:7).
The
revolutionary power of the Beatitudes
It is always a joyful experience
for us to read and reflect on the Beatitudes! Jesus proclaimed them in his first great
sermon, preached on the shore of the sea of Galilee. There was a very large crowd,
so Jesus went up on the mountain to teach his disciples. That is why it is known as
“the Sermon on the Mount”. In the Bible, the mountain is regarded as a place where
God reveals himself. Jesus, by preaching on the mount, reveals himself to be a divine
teacher, a new Moses. What does he tell us? He shows us the way to life, the way that
he himself has taken. Jesus himself is the way, and he proposes this way as the path
to true happiness. Throughout his life, from his birth in the stable in Bethlehem
until his death on the cross and his resurrection, Jesus embodied the Beatitudes.
All the promises of God’s Kingdom were fulfilled in him.
In proclaiming the
Beatitudes, Jesus asks us to follow him and to travel with him along the path of love,
the path that alone leads to eternal life. It is not an easy journey, yet the Lord
promises us his grace and he never abandons us. We face so many challenges in life:
poverty, distress, humiliation, the struggle for justice, persecutions, the difficulty
of daily conversion, the effort to remain faithful to our call to holiness, and many
others. But if we open the door to Jesus and allow him to be part of our lives, if
we share our joys and sorrows with him, then we will experience the peace and joy
that only God, who is infinite love, can give.
The Beatitudes of Jesus are
new and revolutionary. They present a model of happiness contrary to what is usually
communicated by the media and by the prevailing wisdom. A worldly way of thinking
finds it scandalous that God became one of us and died on a cross! According to the
logic of this world, those whom Jesus proclaimed blessed are regarded as useless,
“losers”. What is glorified is success at any cost, affluence, the arrogance of power
and self-affirmation at the expense of others.
Jesus challenges us, young friends,
to take seriously his approach to life and to decide which path is right for us and
leads to true joy. This is the great challenge of faith. Jesus was not afraid to ask
his disciples if they truly wanted to follow him or if they preferred to take another
path (cf. Jn 6:67). Simon Peter had the courage to reply: “Lord, to whom shall we
go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68). If you too are able to say “yes”
to Jesus, your lives will become both meaningful and fruitful.
2. The courage
to be happy
What does it mean to be “blessed” (makarioi in Greek)? To be blessed
means to be happy. Tell me: Do you really want to be happy? In an age when we are
constantly being enticed by vain and empty illusions of happiness, we risk settling
for less and “thinking small” when it come to the meaning of life. Think big instead!
Open your hearts! As Blessed Piergiorgio Frassati once said, “To live without faith,
to have no heritage to uphold, to fail to struggle constantly to defend the truth:
this is not living. It is scraping by. We should never just scrape by, but really
live” (Letter to I. Bonini, 27 February 1925). In his homily on the day of Piergiorgio
Frassati’s beatification (20 May 1990), John Paul II called him “a man of the Beatitudes”
(AAS 82 [1990], 1518).
If you are really open to the deepest aspirations of
your hearts, you will realize that you possess an unquenchable thirst for happiness,
and this will allow you to expose and reject the “low cost” offers and approaches
all around you. When we look only for success, pleasure and possessions, and we turn
these into idols, we may well have moments of exhilaration, an illusory sense of satisfaction,
but ultimately we become enslaved, never satisfied, always looking for more. It is
a tragic thing to see a young person who “has everything”, but is weary and weak.
Saint
John, writing to young people, told them: “You are strong, and the word of God abides
in you, and you have overcome the evil one” (1 Jn 2:14). Young people who choose Christ
are strong: they are fed by his word and they do not need to ‘stuff themselves’ with
other things! Have the courage to swim against the tide. Have the courage to be truly
happy! Say no to an ephemeral, superficial and throwaway culture, a culture that assumes
that you are incapable of taking on responsibility and facing the great challenges
of life!
3. Blessed are the poor in spirit...
The first Beatitude, our
theme for the next World Youth Day, says that the poor in spirit are blessed for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven. At a time when so many people are suffering as a result
of the financial crisis, it might seem strange to link poverty and happiness. How
can we consider poverty a blessing?
First of all, let us try to understand
what it means to be “poor in spirit”. When the Son of God became man, he chose the
path of poverty and self-emptying. As Saint Paul said in his letter to the Philippians:
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form
of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself,
taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness” (2:5-7). Jesus is God
who strips himself of his glory. Here we see God’s choice to be poor: he was rich
and yet he became poor in order to enrich us through his poverty (cf. 2 Cor 8:9).
This is the mystery we contemplate in the crib when we see the Son of God lying in
a manger, and later on the cross, where his self-emptying reaches its culmination.
The
Greek adjective ptochós (poor) does not have a purely material meaning. It means “a
beggar”, and it should be seen as linked to the Jewish notion of the anawim, “God’s
poor”. It suggests lowliness, a sense of one’s limitations and existential poverty.
The anawim trust in the Lord, and they know that they can count on him.
As
Saint Therese of the Child Jesus clearly saw, by his incarnation Jesus came among
us as a poor beggar, asking for our love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells
us that “man is a beggar before God” (No. 2559) and that prayer is the encounter of
God’s thirst and our own thirst (No. 2560).
Saint Francis of Assisi understood
perfectly the secret of the Beatitude of the poor in spirit. Indeed, when Jesus spoke
to him through the leper and from the crucifix, Francis recognized both God’s grandeur
and his own lowliness. In his prayer, the Poor Man of Assisi would spend hours asking
the Lord: “Who are you?” “Who am I?” He renounced an affluent and carefree life in
order to marry “Lady Poverty”, to imitate Jesus and to follow the Gospel to the letter.
Francis lived in imitation of Christ in his poverty and in love for the poor – for
him the two were inextricably linked – like two sides of one coin.
You might
ask me, then: What can we do, specifically, to make poverty in spirit a way of life,
a real part of our own lives? I will reply by saying three things.
First of
all, try to be free with regard to material things. The Lord calls us to a Gospel
lifestyle marked by sobriety, by a refusal to yield to the culture of consumerism.
This means being concerned with the essentials and learning to do without all those
unneeded extras which hem us in. Let us learn to be detached from possessiveness and
from the idolatry of money and lavish spending. Let us put Jesus first. He can free
us from the kinds of idol-worship which enslave us. Put your trust in God, dear young
friends! He knows and loves us, and he never forgets us. Just as he provides for the
lilies of the field (cf. Mt 6:28), so he will make sure that we lack nothing. If we
are to come through the financial crisis, we must be also ready to change our lifestyle
and avoid so much wastefulness. Just as we need the courage to be happy, we also need
the courage to live simply.
Second, if we are to live by this Beatitude, all
of us need to experience a conversion in the way we see the poor. We have to care
for them and be sensitive to their spiritual and material needs. To you young people
I especially entrust the task of restoring solidarity to the heart of human culture.
Faced with old and new forms of poverty – unemployment, migration and addictions of
various kinds – we have the duty to be alert and thoughtful, avoiding the temptation
to remain indifferent. We have to remember all those who feel unloved, who have no
hope for the future and who have given up on life out of discouragement, disappointment
or fear. We have to learn to be on the side of the poor, and not just indulge in rhetoric
about the poor! Let us go out to meet them, look into their eyes and listen to them.
The poor provide us with a concrete opportunity to encounter Christ himself, and to
touch his suffering flesh.
However – and this is my third point – the poor
are not just people to whom we can give something. They have much to offer us and
to teach us. How much we have to learn from the wisdom of the poor! Think about it:
several hundred years ago a saint, Benedict Joseph Labré, who lived on the streets
of Rome from the alms he received, became a spiritual guide to all sorts of people,
including nobles and prelates. In a very real way, the poor are our teachers. They
show us that people’s value is not measured by their possessions or how much money
they have in the bank. A poor person, a person lacking material possessions, always
maintains his or her dignity. The poor can teach us much about humility and trust
in God. In the parable of the pharisee and the tax-collector (cf. Lk 18:9-14), Jesus
holds the tax-collector up as a model because of his humility and his acknowledgment
that he is a sinner. The widow who gave her last two coins to the temple treasury
is an example of the generosity of all those who have next to nothing and yet give
away everything they have (Lk 21:1-4).
4. … for theirs is the kingdom of heaven The
central theme of the Gospel is the kingdom of God. Jesus is the kingdom of God in
person; he is Immanuel, God-with-us. And it is in the human heart that the kingdom,
God’s sovereignty, takes root and grows. The kingdom is at once both gift and promise.
It has already been given to us in Jesus, but it has yet to be realized in its fullness.
That is why we pray to the Father each day: “Thy kingdom come”.
There is a
close connection between poverty and evangelization, between the theme of the last
World Youth Day – “Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations!” (Mt 28:19) –
and the theme for this year: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven” (Mt 5:3). The Lord wants a poor Church which evangelizes the poor. When
Jesus sent the Twelve out on mission, he said to them: “Take no gold, nor silver,
nor copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor
a staff; for the labourers deserve their food” (Mt 10:9-10). Evangelical poverty is
a basic condition for spreading the kingdom of God. The most beautiful and spontaneous
expressions of joy which I have seen during my life were by poor people who had little
to hold onto. Evangelization in our time will only take place as the result of contagious
joy.
We have seen, then, that the Beatitude of the poor in spirit shapes our
relationship with God, with material goods and with the poor. With the example and
words of Jesus before us, we realize how much we need to be converted, so that the
logic of being more will prevail over that of having more! The saints can best help
us to understand the profound meaning of the Beatitudes. So the canonization of John
Paul II, to be celebrated on the Second Sunday of Easter, will be an event marked
by immense joy. He will be the great patron of the World Youth Days which he inaugurated
and always supported. In the communion of saints he will continue to be a father and
friend to all of you.
This month of April marks the thirtieth anniversary of
the entrustment of the Jubilee Cross of the Redemption to the young. That symbolic
act by John Paul II was the beginning of the great youth pilgrimage which has since
crossed the five continents. The Pope’s words on that Easter Sunday in 1984 remain
memorable: “My dear young people, at the conclusion of the Holy Year, I entrust to
you the sign of this Jubilee Year: the cross of Christ! Carry it throughout the world
as a symbol of the love of the Lord Jesus for humanity, and proclaim to everyone that
it is only in Christ, who died and rose from the dead, that salvation and redemption
are to be found”.
Dear friends, the Magnificat, the Canticle of Mary, poor
in spirit, is also the song of everyone who lives by the Beatitudes. The joy of the
Gospel arises from a heart which, in its poverty, rejoices and marvels at the works
of God, like the heart of Our Lady, whom all generations call “blessed” (cf. Lk 1:48).
May Mary, Mother of the poor and Star of the new evangelization help us to live the
Gospel, to embody the Beatitudes in our lives, and to have the courage always to be
happy.